Roald Dahl's pad.

"There’s a richer literary history here than we usually give ourselves credit for," says Kim Roberts, a D.C. poet who's spent the last five years gathering evidence to prove that point. Last week, Roberts and collaborator Dan Vera, a poet and author, launched dcwriters.org, an impressive compendium of more than 120 dead authors who called the area home, along with information about where they lived.

As my colleague Shani Hilton pointed out last week, one of the site's coolest aspects is that it sheds light on a number of authors not typically associated with the District, like Sinclair Lewis. Lewis wrote three books in the District—Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith—and lived in homes in Georgetown and Logan Circle.

Roberts and Vera's research started as a hobby: They combed through writers' correspondence and old city records, and, if the home was still standing, they photographed it. "It takes a certain kind of compulsive person to do this kind of research," says Roberts. The work eventually yielded an article on D.C. writers' homes in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, which Roberts edits. From there—and with support from the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., the Split This Rock poetry festival, and other groups—Roberts and Vera set to build their work into a website.

Writers whose homes have been demolished—like Walt Whitman's—weren't included. Nor were living authors—"because of issues of privacy," Roberts says. "We wanted to make it more about honoring the history of the city." So you won't find, say, George Pelecanos' Silver Spring home on dcwriters.org. (Then again, if you do a public records search...)

The website has some pretty nice gets. Philip K. Dick, the celebrated sci-fi author, lived at 708 Varnum St. NW in Petworth for several years as a child, when his parents, who both worked for the federal government, were separated. When Roberts and Vera visited Dick’s Petworth home, the “older woman who lived there had noooooo idea who Philip K. Dick was,” says Vera. “Her son came out and I mentioned some of the movies [Dick] inspired,” like Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report. “He was amazed.”

Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (a travel writer who had the idea to plant cherry trees in D.C. back in 1885) and John Dos Passos, the prolific and controversial 20th century novelist, lived in the same house in Dupont, many decades apart.

Before beginning his literary career, the Welsh children's author Roald Dahl lived in three homes in the District. “He lived here in a sort of previous life as a spy during World War II,” Vera says. A member of the British Royal Airforce, Dahl served in D.C. as Assistant Air Attache but also worked with the Canadian master spy William Stephensen. Dahl wrote his first published essay, “Shot Down Over Libya,” here.

Roberts says she was pleased to include Zora Neale Hurston, who lived in Columbia Heights in the early 1920s. "She’s really associated with Florida and New York," Roberts says, but Hurston was published in a periodical at Howard University, where she began her undergraduate degree.

One of the site's more interesting inclusions is Ezra Pound—the poet, editor, and Fascist mouthpiece—who was incarcerated for treason at St. Elizabeth's for 12 years following World War II. "We debated if we should include institutions," says Roberts—but because "there was a community that was galvanized around his incarceration," Pound made the cut.

So, yeah, there's a lot there. If all of this starts some new literary turf wars—see Philadelphia and Baltimore's sparring over who deserves to house the remains of Edgar Allan Poe—Vera and Roberts should be proud.

Which is an interesting concept, since the series launches on Sept. 11 with Spencer Finch, a Brooklyn-based artist, who presents a body of work on clouds, alluding to a day in 1863 when Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln crossed paths. "It is about specific events that took place here but also about what draws people to the city and the desire to experience history," says Sarah Newman, the curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran, in a press release. Strange: People don't usually visit D.C. to experience the clouds. Or does the show suggest that on some breezy, overcast day—maybe, possibly, if you're lucky—you just might cross the path of some senator or congressman? After all, presidents don't get out like they used to a century and a half ago, and chances are you won't accidentally bump into President Obama's jogging detail.

Putting aside the loose connection between Finch's clouds and the series' theme, why isn't a D.C. artist represented in the series? (The next ONE exhibit, which opens June 18, 2011, stars Chris Martin, who grew up in the area but has spent his professional life in New York.) There's plenty of local artists who dealswith issues central to Washington. For the Corcoran to ignore them is at best a missed opportunity.

Vanderslice is a talented musician who, with the help of other talented musicians, performed a repertoire rich with rollicking, smartly arranged pop-rock songs. Between songs he kept it light and affable, complimenting a blueberry pie an audience member had baked for the band and asking to check out some guy in the front row’s camera. But there was no upstaging Matsson, whose stage presence combined the quirk of a street mime with the brimstone of a tent revivalist to create something weird and very moving.

Matsson's moniker is farce; the man is exceptionally short, his Swedish blood notwithstanding. I would put him at 5'5", tops. He wore a pale-blue collared button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up high. His visage was youthful and almost Elven: high cheekbones, dark playful eyes, a fastidious little mustache clinging to his upper lip, and a carefully sculpted duck's-ass coiffuer. At first glance, Matsson appeared less a towering titan than an ex-jockey on his way to audition for Grease.

In the song "The Gardener," Matsson hinted at the origin of his superlative stage name:

I know the runner's going to tell you
There ain't no cowboy in my hair
So now he's buried by the daisies
So I could stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe

Here, size is not a measure of dimensions but of presence; and in this regard, Matsson looms large indeed. His masterful guitar-playing would be spectacle enough, but Matsson was not content to merely sit back and croon. He would march around the stage, kneel as if praying, scoop with his guitar neck as if seining a tidal pool for minnows, and gaze at individual audience members for many moments at a time as if to transmit, telekinetically, some urgent message. (This made his guitar work all the more impressive. Matsson’s compositions are extremely technical: He switched into a new tuning after—and sometimes during—most songs. That he was so precise in his finger-picking amid his theatrics was uncanny. Even the tuning was made into a droll exhibition.)

When Matsson did speak, he did so sparingly and never comprehensibly. Sometimes he would approach the mic as if to speak and then back away, like a rodent poking suspiciously at a crust of bread—an affected shyness that seemed to parody the persona that one might, on first glance, presume him to have. Then he’d start picking a bright riff and unleash a nose-full-of-brambles Delta bray, as if suddenly cohabitated by the ghosts of Mississippi John Hurt and Howlin’ Wolf. Never judge a diminutive Swedish folkie by its cover—or stature.

That brings us back to Pug and the question of folk’s inheritance. In the interest of appeasing those who might have shared my friend’s complaint, let me be clear: Folk is not a homogeneous genre. In the strictest sense, it doesn’t even have a defining sound; it needs only to be rooted in the tradition of the common people of a certain land or region. For reasons Alexis de Tocqueville might be more apt than I to explain, American folk—especially that of the 20th Century—has been heavily influenced by politics. Folk music has been vehicle for describing the plight of the common man in all its forms. But in democratic conditions, this exercise takes on new meaning: describing the plight of the common man, where it once meant merely taking ownership of one's lot, now implies a call for change. This seems to be the strain of American folk Pug has tapped into with Nation of Heat.

But there is another strain of folk, one that is tied to the land and the yeoman (both of which Tocqueville described as meticulously as Americans' political tendencies). This is where Matsson stakes his claim. His lyrics are more backwoods, full of landscapes, seasons, flora and fauna (moles, snakes, foxes, eagles—even a unicorn!), and the elements. His characters are dreamers, and his descriptions of love and loss and playfulness and unease are rooted firmly in the rural aesthetic. Consider:

I’m gonna float up in the ceiling
I built a levee of the stars
And in my field of tired horses
I built a freeway through this farce
Well if I ever get that slumber
I’ll be that mole deep in the ground
And I won’t be found

These are the sort of lyrics that are littered all over The Tallest Man on Earth’s debut LP, Shallow Grave. If Pug's folk is the poetry of association, Matsson’s is the poetry of remove.

Ironically, the highlight of his performance Tuesday (aside from an arresting cover of the Irish folk standard “Moonshiner”) was probably the song with the most political imagery: an upbeat strummer called “The King of Spain”:

…I wear my boots of Spanish leather
Oh, while I’m tightening my crown
I’ll disappear in some Flamenco
Perhaps I’ll reach the other side
Why are you stamping my illusion
Just ’cause I stole some eagle’s wings
Because you named me as your lover
Like all I could be anything
Well, if you reinvent my name
Well, if you redirect my day
I wanna be the king of Spain

The song is a celebration of masquerade and ambition: an appropriate choice for the undersized Swede to belt out at the conclusion of a show during which he transformed from a droll little sideshow to the tallest man in our eyes.

Here's Matsson performing elsewhere:

Social commentary, especially in music, is a tricky act: too blunt, audience rolls its eyes; too fine, audience scratches its head. "Whitman once explained that poetry's not supposed to confuse people," Joe Pug–local boy and folk icon-in-waiting–said in an interview last summer. At the same time, musicians that merely trot out talking points or shout buzz words while beating a defenseless instrument may be dismayed to find their art doesn't last.

Notwithstanding overeager proclamations from the occasional starry-eyed critic, folk has yet to find its next prophet. (Remember when it was supposed to be Conor Oberst?) Last year, the restless Greenbelt native Pug (last name shortened from Pugliese) dropped out of college and promptly yanked the sword out the stone. For a man of 23, Pug struck a remarkable balance between innuendo and clarity in his 2008 debut EP, Nation of Heat. He uses old tools (voice, guitar, harmonica), long verses, and one-line choruses, letting his lyrics stand on their own legs. His delivery is at once cocky and sincere, pressing notes to the roof of his mouth and spilling his melodies over the chord changes. Pug is a student of the old school, and his influences are pretty apparent–although in the interest of avoiding hypocrisy, I've promised myself not to use the "D" word until he puts out a proper album.

Pug doesn't sing protest songs, exactly. The EP's title track, "Nation of Heat," is a scattershot critique of the pressures and contradictions of American life, but it's more a portrait than a polemic. "Hymn 101," "Hymn 35," and "I Do My Father's Drugs," meanwhile, address not political questions but existential ones: Why have I come here? What am I? How can I define myself in contradistinction to my forebears? These are relevant questions for anyone, but especially for an anachronism like Pug. The answers he offers on Nation of Heat are full of passion and irreverence and confusion and the kind of chilling poetry that you feel right between your shoulderblades. But Pug's first full-length album–which is expected this year, despite his marathon touring schedule–will have some big questions of its own to answer: Can Joe Pug save folk for his generation? If so, will his generation notice?

Pug will be sharing a stage with alt.-country legend Steve Earle in Richmond and Charlottesville on June 6th and 9th. If you were like me and missed Pug when he came to the Black Cat the other week, I highly recommend that you make the trip–and I highly recommend that you give me a ride.